Forever, Interrupted(36)
“Hi, you’ve reached the voice mail of Ben Ross. Please leave a message and I’ll call you back. If this is about what I’m doing later tonight, I am busy. Don’t bother asking because the answer is that I am busy. From now on, I will always be busy.”
I listen over and over again until I know the inflections and pauses by heart, until I can hear it even when it’s not playing. And then I dial again.
This time I don’t get to the message. Susan picks up.
“Elsie! Jesus! Just stop it, okay? Leave me alone. I can’t take it anymore! He’s going to be buried! Just like you wanted. Now stop.”
“Uh . . . ” I say, too dumbfounded to even know how to respond.
“Good-bye, Elsie!”
She hangs up the phone.
I sit there stunned, simply staring straight ahead, eyes unfocused, but resting on one spot on the ceiling. She could have turned off the ringer, I think. She could have turned off the phone. But she didn’t. She wanted to scream at me instead.
I dial Ben’s number again and she picks up. “Damn it!” she says.
“You want to sit there and pretend you knew everything about your son, you go ahead. Live the lie if you want to. But don’t try to bring me down with you. I am his wife. He had been scared to tell you about me for six months. Six months of him going to your house with the intention of telling you that he had fallen in love and six months of him not doing it because he thought you were too distraught to handle it. So yes, he hid it from you. And I let him because I loved him. You want to be pissed at him. Go ahead. You want to be in denial about what happened. Go right ahead. I really don’t care anymore, Susan. But I lost my husband and I will call his f*cking phone over and over and over if I want to because I miss his voice. So turn it off if you have to, but that’s your only option.”
She’s quiet for a minute, and I want to hang up but I also want to hear what she has to say for herself.
“It’s funny to me that you think six months is a long period of time,” she says. And then she hangs up.
My fury sends me up out of my bedroom. It throws shoes on my feet. When Ana asks what I’m doing, my fury tells her I’ll be back later. It pushes me out the front door, into the June heat, and then it leaves me there.
I stand outside, unsure of how I feel or what to do. I stand there for a long time, and then I turn around and walk right back inside. There’s no walking away from this problem. There’s no cooling off from this.
I have to pick out an outfit for tomorrow,” I say when I come back in.
“No, you don’t,” Ana says. “I pulled out what you’re wearing. You shouldn’t have to think about that.”
“What am I wearing?” I look at her, grateful and confused.
“I tried to find the perfect balance of sex appeal and decorum, so you’re wearing that long sleeveless black shift dress I found with black pumps. And I bought you this.” Ana pulls something out from under the couch. It occurs to me this couch has been her bed for days now, when I’m not using it to avoid my own.
She returns and hands me a box. I set it down in front of me and pull off the top. Inside the box is a small black hat with a thin, short black veil. It’s a morbid gift, a gift you can’t really say “thank you” for or say you always wanted. But somehow, this small gift fills a small chunk of the huge hole in my heart.
I slowly move toward it, delicately removing it from the box. The tissue paper crinkles around it. I move the box from my knees onto the floor and I put the hat on. I look to Ana to help me set it straight, to make it right. Then I walk into the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror.
For the first time since Ben died, I look like a widow. For the first time since I lost him, I feel like I recognize the person in the mirror. There I am, grief-stricken and un-whole. Widowed. It’s such a relief to see myself this way. I have felt so insecure in my widowness that seeing myself look like a widow comforts me. I want to run to Susan and say, “Look at me. Don’t I look like a woman that lost her husband?” If I look the part, everyone will believe me.
Ana is behind me in the bathroom. Her shoulders are hunched; her hands are clasped together, fingers intertwined. She is clearly unsure if she’s made a huge mistake in giving me the type of gift one hopes never to receive. I turn to her and take off the hat. She helps me set it down.
“Thank you,” I say, holding her shoulder. For some reason, I don’t need to rest my head on it right now. “It’s beautiful.”
Ana shrugs, her head sinking slightly as her shoulders sag in. “Are you sure? It’s not too much? It’s not too . . . macabre?”
I don’t actually know what macabre means, so I just shake my head. Whatever bad thing she thinks this gift might be, she is wrong. Given the circumstances, I love it.
“You are a friend that I could never . . . ” I choke on the words, unable to look her in the eye. “No one deserves a friend as wonderful as you,” I say. “Except maybe you.”
Ana smiles and seizes my temporarily not-miserable mood to slap the back of my thighs. “What can I say, kid? I love ya. Always have.”
“Should I try on the whole thing?” I ask, suddenly somewhat eager for an old-fashioned game of dress-up. Ana and I used to play dress-up in college, each of us going into the bathroom to try to come up with the most ridiculous outfits for the other one to wear. This is different; this is much, much sadder, but . . . this type of dress-up is where life has taken us and Ana is on board.